Spot on Island Man! The NT, like the OT for that matter, is drawn solidly from paganism, that means the folk beliefs of the common people.
Paul talks of being in the third heaven, he couldn't remember "whether in the body or not" so he said. What he was doing was referencing current pagan beliefs of levels of heaven to gain the confidence of those pagan believers to get them into his cult. After all they had similar goals of heavenly life, a ransom sacrifice through a god man saviour whether it was Dionysus (who was crucified for believing mankind) or Mithra who instigated the Lord's Evening Meal hundreds of years before Jesus did; they all believed in heavenly gods.
An intriguing link with all God-men including Jesus was that they were born of a virgin and the were the son of a powerful God (the Sun God). This links strongly with the very source of these folk stories: they were traditional and near-universal tales woven into the constellations of stars, the Sun and the Moon. "Born of a virgin" was reference to the part of the sky even today still labelled Virgo.This related to the ancient calendar when the saviour was born in mid winter... and died the sacrificial lamb in (Aries) at the spring equinox.The NT dresses up these familiar accounts and brings to the mythology an account of flesh and blood as if they were real people.
To take the paganism out of the Bible would completely take all the stuffing out of it because at its heart, it encapsulates the essential stories of paganism.
So: long life the Bible...but don't believe a word of it!
It's much better to know why it was written.